


The Lives of the Poets

by superblackmarket



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M, Writer's Block, and then later in chile, joe vs modernism, various historical figures - Freeform, venice 1973
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:41:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28939410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblackmarket/pseuds/superblackmarket
Summary: “What is this about, really?” Nicky interrupted. “Are you telling me that you have the—what do they call it? Writer’s block?”“No,” Joe said immediately.OR, Joe has writer's block.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 81
Kudos: 279





	The Lives of the Poets

They had been lying in bed together, Nicky reading while Joe sprawled across him, dozing— when they were truly off-duty, Joe slept like a starfish, arms and legs flung out in profligate profusion, draped over as much of Nicky’s skin as possible, while Nicky, pinned beneath him, would claim a small oblong space at the edge of the mattress and occupy it with the serene stillness of a corpse in a coffin—when Joe sat up.

“Did you know, Nico, that Neruda’s collected poems run more than thirty-five hundred pages?”

Nicky shut his book—he’d been reading Neruda’s _Extravagaria_ —and set it aside. “Yes, love. You told me so this morning, and again this afternoon.”

Neruda had died several days ago, and the news had unlocked a peculiar strain of anxiety within Joe. “Is it possible to be _too_ prolific, do you think?” he asked Nicky.

Neruda had been a friendly acquaintance of theirs—Joe and Nicky owned some property in Chile, a little house by the sea just south of Valparaíso, and Neruda was their neighbor. They hadn’t known he was to be their neighbor, or they never would have purchased it. Neruda’s seaside home at Isla Negra was a mecca for lovers from the world over. Whenever he was in residence, the place would be overrun by young people carrying _Veinte poemas de amor_ as their only guidebook. Despite the hazards of living near such a bustling tourist attraction, Joe and Nicky liked their property there very much. Isla Negra was neither an island nor black, but a fishing village with yellow dirt paths running between giant pine trees and a wild green sea. There was a little inn nearby, a cheerful, noisy place where they took the occasional meal when Nicky tired of cooking, and it was there that they had met Neruda.

The poet had appeared in his gaudy poncho and Andean hat, bulky and slow-moving as the pope, and asked to use the telephone. Then he’d struck up a conversation with Doña Elena, the proprietress, about how to prepare a certain dish for friends at his house that night. Nicky was drawn into the discussion—he’d been experimenting with sopaipillas himself—and the two of them wound up with invitations to Neruda’s dinner party.

Neruda, as it turned out, was an expert in culinary delights and could cook like a professional. He fussed over even the smallest details of the table setting and changed the cloth, dishes, and silverware several times until he deemed them in harmony with the food being prepared. The food was memorable, the house even more so, distinguished not by its simplicity but by its extravagance—such wealth, Nicky had murmured to Joe, was perhaps a little incongruous with the poet’s public-facing communism. One remarkable renovation cut the living room off from the dining room, and it took a walk through the patio to get from one room to the other, with umbrellas graciously provided during the rainy season.

Neruda’s passion for capturing nature, Joe and Nicky discovered, was not restricted to his poetry. He had amassed collections of twisted seashells, figureheads from ships, astonishing moths and butterflies, strange glasses and goblets. Joe, who had always associated bad taste with bad luck, warned Neruda that his collections would be better off in a museum, where they’d bring no harm down upon his head. Greatly amused, Neruda had replied that poetry was the antidote to bad luck and his frightful collections proved this beyond a doubt.

But even poetry had its limits, and now he was dead. 

Died of chronic leukemia, according to the official report, but Joe suspected that the military coup had exhausted his desire to go on living. He and Nicky had read about it in the papers, how soldiers had broken into Neruda’s house at Isla Negra and ransacked his snail collection, his shells, his butterflies, his bottles, his stamp albums, the ship figureheads he had rescued from so many seas, his books, his paintings, and his unfinished poems, looking for subversive weapons and hidden communists, until the ailing poet’s heart began to falter. The soldiers had taken him to Santiago, where he died four days later.

“Thirty-five hundred pages,” Joe repeated, trying to impress upon Nicky the significance of this number. “And I don’t think _I_ have written anything worthwhile since 1912.”

Nicky reminded him that they had been exceedingly busy since 1912.

“So was fucking Neruda!” Joe exclaimed, and launched into a tirade about how the man’s life as a diplomat, exile, and occasional fugitive had not been a quiet one, and yet his collected works _still_ ran in excess of thirty-five hundred pages; Joe doubted that his own output—were it ever anthologized—would constitute anything near that, which marked a great personal failure on Joe’s part, because Neruda’s sixty-nine years of life were but a tiny fraction of Joe’s nine hundred, and—

“What is this about, really?” Nicky interrupted, resting his palm on Joe’s chest, eyebrows lifting at the fierce agitation of Joe’s heart as it pounded against his ribcage. “Are you telling me that you have the—what do they call it? Writer’s block?”

“ _No_ ,” Joe said immediately. He disapproved, on principle, of writer’s block. It was a modern notion that had come out of psychoanalysis and catered to a navel-gazing generation that didn’t want to work. He tried not to think about Coleridge, whose font of inspiration dried up when he was only in his mid-twenties, about Rimbaud, who gave up poetry at the age of nineteen, or about Shelley, whose words had been haunting him recently. “A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry,’” Shelley had written; poetry was the product of “some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind,” which more or less blew the material right into the poet, and he had to wait around patiently for this to happen. In terms of getting up in the morning and sitting down to write, Joe thought, a crueler theory could hardly be imagined.

“It’s… possible,” he allowed.

“Yusuf, my love _._ ” Nicky bumped their noses together. “You are an artist, a scholar, a poet, and a warrior. You are a great many things, ya rouhi, and you don’t have to be all of them at once.” He slid down Joe’s body, kissing the delicate skin inside one thigh and rubbing his stubbled cheek against it. The muscles in Joe’s legs went bowstring tight, then suddenly yielded, knees spreading wider.

“I am only one thing consistently,” Joe said, hand coming up to cradle the back of Nicky’s head.

“What’s that?”

“A lover. Yours, to be precise.”

Nicky brushed the back of his hand along Joe’s cock, which was hardening rapidly. He caressed his hipbones with his thumbs, and, at his own selfish leisure, took him slowly into his mouth. Joe’s foot moved convulsively, smacking against the mattress as Nicky wrapped his tongue wetly around him, drew his lips tighter. Joe heard himself making ragged sounds in response, nothing theatrical, nothing artful, but loud and pulled from a place deep inside of him—a place beyond poetry—that only Nicky got to see, to reach.

Then Nicky took his mouth away, and Joe was all agitated acquiescence as Nicky straddled his lap. Joe wrapped his hand around both of them, breath stuttering as Nicky began those little push-and-slide movements that made him wild. He buried his face against Nicky’s shoulder; Nicky rested his chin atop his head as if to anchor him there. He rocked his hips, grinding his cock against Joe’s, and added his own hand when one grip wasn’t enough.

They moved together furiously, possessed by a vehement impatience as if they hadn’t made love less than an hour before. Joe turned his head and forced his eyes open, determined to watch Nicky come undone. Nicky’s beautiful face was rapt, focused, the most familiar thing in the universe, and yet—… In moments like this Joe would recall the early days with something like amazement, back when he would steal glances at the strange-eyed priest and think that the man’s face could be a halfway pleasing thing, if only the Frank would stop glaring down his overlarge nose and curling his lip with such murderous disdain. Even then, Yusuf had found himself admiring the bold lines of Nicolò’s face, the sharp, distinct planes overlaid with pale, delicate-seeming flesh. The vaulting browline suited the luminous, heavy-lidded eyes, prosceniums over windows through which streamed clear, if often harsh and unforgiving light. Gazing at his companion, Yusuf had imagined clay, cool and plasticine, and his own fingers stretching and smoothing it just so: molding the long slope of Nicolò’s nose, the obstinate tilt of his chin, rolling it into ropes between his palms and then painstakingly shaping each lock of hair one by one. He’d contented himself with charcoal and ink. The poetry had come later, after they were lovers.

Nicky’s free hand yanked Joe’s head back, tugging sharply at his hair, but Joe didn’t register it as pain. He actually laughed, and whatever that laughter shook loose inside him made him come, all over his hand and Nicky’s, and Nicky was only moments behind him, a glorious and sticky eruption that spattered Joe all the way up to his chin.

“Shall we have a poem before we sleep?” Joe asked, once they’d bathed and settled back in. This was an old tradition of theirs: one of them would open a book at a random page and the other would read the poem. It often turned out to have uncanny significance for them and the particular moment they were living through.

“Mmm…” Nicky reached for the book on the nightstand and passed it over; Joe opened it.

“Well?” he prompted, when Nicky had been silent for too long. “What does Neruda have to say to us?”

Reluctantly, Nicky read: “ _¿Cuánto vive el hombre, por fin? ¿Vive mil días o uno solo? ¿Una semana o varios siglos? ¿Por cuánto tiempo muere el hombre? ¿Qué quiere decir ‘para siempre’?”_

Joe shivered. “Not quite the pick-me-up I was hoping for,” he said, with forced lightness. 

He could see from the expression on Nicky’s face that he regretted reading the poem.

Joe slept fitfully that night. The televised footage from Neruda’s funeral flickered across his eyelids. Swedish cameramen had filmed the cortège, to send back to Nobel’s frozen land the grim footage of machine guns posted on both sides of the street, the flower-covered coffin, the onlookers’ blanched faces, the group of women clustered in the doorway of the morgue, scanning the names on the lists of the dead.

_How much does a man live, after all? Does he live a thousand days, or one only? For a week, or for several centuries? How long does a man spend dying? What does it mean to say “for ever”?_

*

Nicky took it into his head to visit San Michele the next morning.

The four of them were presently in Venice, recuperating from East Pakistan—Bangladesh—and from Vietnam before that. They were in Venice because Booker had been nostalgic for it and Andy had been amenable; neither Joe nor Nicky particularly cared for it. The last time they had been in this city, warplanes had sung in the skies like unseasonal mosquitoes and bombs fell like steel rain. But Joe was restive for other reasons. Writer’s block or no, he had always sworn that he would never write anything about Venice. There was nothing more vulgar and futile than encouraging the production of even one more page about the city, perhaps the most frequently cited place in the world of books. Writing about Venice, he told Nicky, was like emptying a glass of water into the sea.

All the same, when Nicky took it into his head to visit San Michele, Joe tucked a notebook into his pocket and announced that he would tag along. The two of them had never actually visited Venice’s famous cemetery before, even though the Isola di San Michele had borne that role with dignity since the early 1800s, when Napoleon’s occupying forces told the Venetians to start hauling their dead across the water instead of burying them haphazardly all over town.

The two of them arrived at the cemetery under a blistering midday sun. Joe looked around, simultaneously impressed and underwhelmed. San Michele was a rectangular island, separated from Venice by a stretch of water and a wall that enclosed the burial grounds. The cemetery itself was wide and calm, a series of huge gardens studded with cypress trees and cluttered with hundreds of thousands of tombs—some lavishly monumental, with domes and sculptures and wrought-iron gates, some stacked in high modern terraces like filing systems. Some sections were beautifully tended; others had an atmosphere of rustic decay. There were tombstones covered in moss, tombstones leaning at precipitous angles, tombstones keeled over in a parody of those whose deaths they commemorated.

There was also the occasional English epitaph, recalling a time when the British upper classes had regarded Venice as their home away from home. Joe, walking a few paces ahead of Nicky, let out an abrupt cackle and pointed to the inscription honoring a Straffordshire man: _Left us in peace, Febry 2 1910._

“Yeah, I’ll bet he did,” he snickered, and Nicky hushed him.

Unlike many cemeteries in Europe, San Michele was no flourishing center of necro-intellectual tourism. There were no guides or maps, much less a list of the coordinates of its most famous dead, like those at the entrances of Montparnasse and Père Lachaise. If you didn’t know that the notable foreigners were separated from the ordinary Venetians—heaven forbid that a gondolier should lie next to the former mistress of Tsar Nikolai I—you could spend hours wandering around between the Antoninos, Marcelinos, and Francescos, without realizing that the remains of Sergei Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, and Ezra Pound lay elsewhere.

They explored independently for an hour or so. By the time Joe had located Stravinsky and Diaghilev, his shirt was sticking to his back and he was ready to take a breather. He tracked down Nicky and found him in the Protestant section, standing pensively before Ezra Pound’s marker.

Nicky harbored an exceptionally vicious hatred for Pound. He had often said, after the war, that if it had been up to him Pound would have been left hanging upside-down from a lamppost alongside Mussolini.

Instead, Pound had lived to the ripe old age of eighty-seven and died only last year.

“The outcome of a long-awaited first meeting is often disappointment,” Joe remarked, brushing his fingers across Nicky’s. “The same is true of an encounter with a dead person, except there’s no need to hide your disappointment.”

Nicky’s lip curled, his eyes glittered dangerously. Religion had instilled in him absurdly decorous forms of behavior at funeral masses and in cemeteries: not speaking, only praying, walking silently with head bowed and hands clasped at waist level. Joe knew that he wouldn’t spit on Pound’s grave—or, god forbid, piss on it, as Booker had done on Napoleon’s tomb at Invalides—but his expression made it clear that he considered the man an utter disgrace to the profession of poetry and letters.

“I am remembering something that Shelley wrote,” Nicky said. “‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’”

“From his _Defence of Poetry_ , yeah,” Joe said bitterly; that same treatise was the source of those vexing dictums about invisible influences and inconstant winds that he’d been turning over in his mind as he tried, and failed, to compose poetry.

“The example of Pound makes one think that certain legislators are best left unacknowledged, no?” Nicky said.

“Well, in this day and age, ‘unacknowledged legislators’ sounds more like the secret police than the poets,” Joe replied. “But the world was a different place back when Shelley wrote that, and I doubt fascist pricks like Pound were what he had in mind.”

“What about Neruda?”

“Never should’ve gone into politics.”

“Because poets are bad politicians?”

“Because politics is bad for poetry.”

“The left wing as well as the right?”

“Left wing, right wing, wingless, what does it matter?” Joe shoved his hands in his pockets, unaccountably irritated. “The work falls down as soon as you start substituting the language of politics for the language of the imagination.”

“I don’t object to Neruda identifying with the poor and defenseless in his poetry,” Nicky countered. “That part doesn’t bother me. It’s only when he suggests that he knows better than they do what’s good for them—”

“Maybe he should’ve stuck to his stamp albums and his snails. He was a piss-poor communist, anyway.”

“Joe—”

“Was there anyone else you wanted to look for here, Nico?” he interrupted.

Nicky shook his head. “I’m ready to sit under one of those trees and have a cigarette.”

Joe was, too. They sat in the shade of the cypresses and passed a cigarette back and forth. There was nobody else in sight, so he rested his head on Nicky’s shoulder, a silent apology for his outburst of temper. The knot in his chest eased when Nicky pressed a kiss to his brow.

He gazed round at their surroundings. He’d never been capable of losing himself in the pensive contemplation of a bird in flight, in the industrious comings and goings of ants, or in the sedate suspension of a spider hanging from its own secretions. Though he enthusiastically plundered the natural world for metaphors to describe Nicky—to whom the majority of his verses were dedicated—he was otherwise too impatient to find poetry in nature’s gentler rhythms.

No, that sort of stillness was much more Nicky’s provenance. Nicky had a way of being in company without drawing attention to himself, which was something of a skill, because he was so striking-looking, tall and broad-shouldered, with a concealed sinewiness to his lean frame—and that was before you even got to his face, his eyes, Joe thought admiringly. There was a gentleness to Nicky, a serenity, though it was those very qualities that coalesced into something ferocious and terrifying when the need arose. Nicky had long ago mastered the art of ennui, of enduring as well as inflicting boredom. He could sit for hours, unmoving, in a sniper’s nest, and then pull the trigger without turning a hair.

Nestling his head more comfortably against Nicky’s shoulder, Joe fished out his notebook and opened it to a blank page. There was no need for a special sensibility toward the animal and vegetable kingdoms in a cemetery, he reflected. It was enough to sit beneath the trees and allow himself to be possessed by the life force flourishing amongst the graves. Maybe it was just the silence that magnified the frenetic flapping of insects, just the calm that quickened the languid creeping of the lizards, just the death that animated the dying leaves of the black poplars.

But when his hand began to move of its own accord, it was not to put down words but to fill the page with little sketches of lizards and cypresses and, from memory, a quick study of Nicky’s erect cock.

“Yusuf,” Nicky chided, when he noticed what was taking shape on the page.

“I know, it’s not to scale, I’d need a much bigger notebook—”

“We’re in a _churchyard_ ,” Nicky said, though he didn’t sound particularly scandalized.

Joe added some shading along the shaft. A bead of sweat ran down his nose.

“Writer’s block—it’s quite popular in America, no?” Nicky remarked, picking up the thread of last night’s conversation as though no time had passed. “A product of all that American overreaching, perhaps, the determination of the writers to, ah—what’s the expression?—to ‘hit the ball out of the park.’” 

Joe chuckled. Few things were _less_ American, he thought, than Nicky saying _hit the ball out of the park_ in his inalterably accented English.

“But humbler themes have their place, too,” Nicky went on. “One of my favorite poems of yours, Joe, will always be your ‘Ode to Mostafa the Blest’—”

“Really?” Joe sat up.

Mostafa was a goat that had belonged to them in the twelfth century, an ornery and bad-tempered specimen with nothing to distinguish him but the fact that he had survived a record fifteen Eid al-Adhas unslaughtered because Nicolò had taken a liking to him. When he finally died of old age, Yusuf had tossed off a poem to commemorate his remarkable longevity, presented it to Nicolò, then returned to composing ghazals on more exalted themes.

“I love it,” Nicky said, with obvious sincerity. 

“Huh.”

“Your simple poems, the ones you scribble down and forget about—I love them. The spontaneity and directness of your language never fails to sweep me away.” Nicky smiled, and Joe touched his cheek, brimming with a fondness so acute that it verged on despair.

“But words are the most inadequate things in the world,” he explained a little desperately. “I haven’t written you a decent poem since this century began, it’s all been drivel, shit, rife with clichés, the whole fucking lot of it—”

“Yusuf, churchyard.”

“Right, I’m sorry, astaghfirullah. It’s just whenever I sit down to write, Nicolò, I feel like I’ve been given a chainsaw for a job that requires a scalpel.” 

“Sounds like a nerve-flaying task.”

“It really is,” Joe agreed fervently. “Here I am, trying to bare my soul and hack through clichés and convention so I can say something new and profound about the nature of love—”

Nicky’s lips twitched.

“You’re—oh, god, Nico, don’t laugh at me.” He dropped his face into his hands.

“Yusuf, I would never,” Nicky assured him, placing a cool palm on the back of Joe’s sweaty neck and rubbing soothing little circles into his skin. “Only this whole notion of soul-baring is very modern and… I think you must have picked it up in the United States. Has there ever been a people more preoccupied with self-exposure than the Americans? I would hazard that the reading public knows more about Philip Roth than they do about some of their first-degree relatives.” 

Joe winced: the more outrageous passages from _Portnoy’s Complaint_ were still vivid in his memory. “You’re probably right about that.”

“Perhaps it was simpler when we were younger,” Nicky said.

“How so?”

“There was something very forthright about art back then, no?” Nicky said. “You would write me a poem, I would sing you a song, you would paint a picture, and it—oh, I don’t know. It felt like having sex, I suppose it addressed a very basic emotional need in both of us.” His fingertips dipped under Joe’s collar, tapped gently along his vertebrae. “When I sing you a song, it’s the same as it ever was, though the mode of the music has changed. But writing—poetry—seems a lot more complicated these days, and I don’t just mean because of the politics, poets becoming legislators and all that.”

Joe thought he understood what Nicky was getting at. Before the Romantics had come along—fucking Shelley with his inconstant fucking winds—art had been a lot more, well, artisanal: Yusuf writing a poem about a goat to make Nicolò smile, the young Leonardo da Vinci arriving at Verocchio’s studio and being told to paint in the angel’s wing. Tell me a story, sing me a song, draw me a picture: Yusuf making love to Nicolò, fingers leaving charcoal smudges across his skin. Basic needs. Modern art, in refusing to do that duty, had a lot to answer for in the development of artistic neurosis, Joe thought grumpily. If poetry wasn’t going to fulfill basic needs anymore, then presumably it was doing something much more sublime and mysterious—whatever the fuck that might be.

“Why did you want to come here?” he asked Nicky.

“Oh, same as everybody else.” Nicky shrugged. “Wander around the tombs, listening for echoes of the _Rite of Spring_. Though unfortunately those may have been drowned out by reverberations of the _Cantos._ I hate that Pound is buried here.”

“Yeah.”

“Pound can cram his vortices,” Nicky said fiercely.

“And Yeats can shove his gyres, and Eliot his wastelands,” Joe agreed. “Now I’m sorrier than ever that Neruda is dead.”

“So am I.”

“The man was a monster of productivity. He probably had at least another fifteen hundred pages in him.”

“And so do you,” Nicky said. “I’m not worried, Yusuf.”

Joe clutched a fistful of Nicky’s hair and tugged him in for an urgent kiss. “My god, Nicolò,” he sighed against his lips. “I’m so in love with you, I feel like I’m always on the verge of combustion. That’s all the poetry’s for, in the end, trying to find new words for how I feel about you. I suppose I’ll spend the rest of my life searching.”

*

More than a decade passed before the two of them made it back to Chile. A low, dishonest decade, Joe thought—Auden’s phrasing—that carried them from the heart of one dirty war to the next, up against forms of brutality that shattered his imagination and strangled his words. This writer’s block phenomenon—it was a metaphysical problem, it was a psychological problem, most of all it was a _language_ problem. He couldn’t seem to surmount its vague, cliché-crammed character to arrive at the actual nature of an experience anymore. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. Sometimes he wondered if he hadn’t outlived the world he was writing about, and for. Nothing felt intrinsic to him these days, except being in love with Nicky.

So when they finally made it back to their little cottage by the sea, they spent the first few days scarcely leaving the bed. Joe was desperate to dissolve into the warmth of Nicky’s skin; he didn’t want to see how the country had changed under the dictatorship. Nicky’s body pulled him in like the tide, and everything was sweet and slow.

The morning of the fourth day he surfaced toward wakefulness—breath short, arms wrapped around nothing—to find Nicky nestled between his legs, hands resting against the backs of his thighs, slowly and patiently sucking at his cock. The perils, he thought groggily, as his hips arched involuntarily upwards, of sleeping sprawled out every which way, you left yourself open to this sort of ambush. He buried his fingers in Nicky’s hair, longer these days, and lifted some of it aside for a better view of his beloved’s face. Nicky looked at him brightly—his eyes were very green today—and let out a smothered chuckle. It was a delightfully ticklish sensation, and Joe laughed too. 

Nicky lifted his mouth off. “I feel so lucky to wake up next to the most handsome man in the world,” he said, beginning to work Joe’s cock with loose, easy strokes of his hand, “that sometimes I simply can’t wait for him to wake up, too.”

“So you got started without me, hmm? Though I fear you’re mistaken, my love, because the most handsome man in the world is y—”

“Hush.” Sitting back on his heels, knees spread wide, straight-backed and perfectly poised, Nicky smiled at him. “Don’t turn my compliment around, please, it’s meant for you. Perhaps I don’t tell you enough how very beautiful you are.”

“I— _ohhh…_ ” A pleased flush still warm on his cheeks, Joe surrendered to the ineffable when Nicky plunged down again. He flailed his arms, grasping for purchase, but there was no headboard for him to cling to, no bedposts for Nicky to bind him to. He settled for folding them above his head, each hand clutching the opposite elbow. Nicky, gratified when Joe demonstrated any small measure of self-control, renewed his efforts, mouth hot and possessive. Joe squeezed his thighs around Nicky’s shoulders with the same proprietorial tenderness and savored the torment of Nicky’s body pressed snugly against his own yet utterly out of reach. Then Nicky rubbed the tip of his finger around his rim and eased it inside.

“That’s so good, Nico, more, please—…”

Nicky obliged, circling his finger as he continued to suck him, and the circles became deeper, wider, faster, until he added a second finger, and Joe marveled, as he had marveled many times before, how something so perfectly divine could be permitted, how they were still able to get away with this after nearly nine hundred years, how language was sublimated into sensation because biology, existence, matter itself had dreamed this up for their personal pleasure and perpetuity—

“ _I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair_.” The sound of his own voice startled him, the words forced out against the undertow of his impending climax. “ _I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face_ —” That was all he could manage before he came down Nicky’s throat, still frantically clutching his own elbows.

Once his molecules had settled, reconsolidating into the shape of a functional human body, he coaxed Nicky to kneel above him. “Fuck my face,” he instructed breathlessly, and Nicky did, with the same focused intensity that he brought to every task laid before him. Joe groaned with delight at the heaviness of Nicky’s cock on his tongue. With one hand he grasped his hip, with the other, he cupped his balls and rolled them gently in his palm. Nicky tossed his head, dashing the sweaty hair from his eyes, and pried Joe’s fingers from his hip so he could lace their hands together. Then his thighs began to shake, and Joe wished he could live inside this moment forever: still euphoric from his own orgasm, with Nicky teetering at the precipice of his, and nothing else in the world but the two of them.

But after Nicky had come, too, after Joe had licked the last salty drop from his lips, after they had taken a leisurely shower and eaten breakfast, the enchantment of their solitude was broken when Nicky suggested an expedition to the neighboring house. Joe wasn’t surprised. Perhaps he’d even invited it, bringing Neruda into their bed that morning.

They walked the short distance that separated Neruda’s house from theirs. There had been an earthquake shortly before they’d arrived, and the ground was still trembling at Isla Negra. Every ten or fifteen minutes a new tremor would ripple through land and sea, making the waves crash against the rocks with a prehistoric roar. 

At first they surveilled Neruda’s property from a safe distance. The house had been sealed by the police, and signs warned that it was forbidden to enter or take photographs. Once they’d ascertained that there was only a single carabinero making the rounds at regular intervals, they allowed themselves to be accosted by him. He waved his pistol and made shooing motions. “¡Váyanse, váyanse!” the carabinero shouted. “¡Aquí todo está prohibido!”

_Everything is forbidden here._

Joe knocked him unconscious with a swift blow to the temple.

Continuing on, they found Neruda’s house in the shade of its sentinel pines, still surrounded by the fence with which the poet had shielded his private life. Flowers had sprung up from the wood, and as they drew close, they saw that it had become the shrine of a devoted cult, decorated by visitors who had come from the world over to draw hearts entwined with initials and write messages of love on the boards that blocked the entrance. Most of them were variations on the same theme: _Juan y Rosa se aman a través de Pablo. Thank you, Pablo, for teaching us about love. We want to love as much as you loved._

But there were other sorts of messages, too, messages repeatedly painted over by the carabineros that stubbornly refused to vanish. _Love never dies. Allende and Neruda live. Pinochet se acerca tu hora. One minute of darkness will not make us blind. Para que tu recuerdo en estos versos vuele._ They were written in the most unexpected spots, and the entire fence gave the impression that, for lack of space, several generations of inscriptions had been superimposed. If anybody had the patience to do it, Joe thought, the complete poems of Pablo Neruda—all thirty-five hundred pages of them—could have been reconstructed from the scattered verses written from memory on the fence boards.

“My god, Yusuf, come look at this.”

Nicky was beckoning urgently, and Joe hurried to join him at the far corner of the fence.

“It’s one of yours, Yusuf,” Nicky said.

“Are you sure? Because I’ve noticed before, the similarities between his language and mine—”

“I’m certain.” Nicky ran his finger over the lines etched into the wood. “ _Lo único monumento que soñaba tener / era evitar sus sueños murieran._ You wrote these words for me, many centuries ago. I could never mistake them, even in a different language.”

Joe read them over again and realized Nicky was correct: they were indeed his, a seventeenth-century ode to the indomitable spirit of his beloved Nicolò. He was astonished by how far his words had journeyed, across time and space and language, to end up here, written in Spanish on the fence of a dead poet’s home in Chile.

_The only monument he dreamed of having / was to keep his dreams from dying._

Joe remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept on growing—like starlight, traveling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Maybe it was the same with poetry.

Awed and a little humbled, he reached for Nicky’s hand. The earth trembled beneath them, and an invisible wind whipped through their hair. Nicky smiled at him gently. The silence between them swelled and subsided like the bellows of an accordion playing a song that only they could hear.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for reading! I started this story ages ago but was inspired to finish it when Marwan Kenzari swept in with his own Neruda inspiration. I have Joe reciting part of Neruda's Love Sonnet XI ("I crave your mouth, your voice...") to Nicky here, and Nicky reads from "Y cuánto vive?" at the beginning. 
> 
> Random historical notes:  
> \- In addition to being a Nobel Prize-winning poet, Neruda was also a lifelong diplomat and became a close adviser to Chile's democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. He was already ill when Pinochet's violent coup overthrew Allende's government in 1973, but there's some evidence that Pinochet had him poisoned while he was receiving his cancer treatment. Pinochet's dictatorship continually sought to curtail Neruda's posthumous influence... and failed epically. Neruda's legacy only grew. Joe is slightly jealous. 
> 
> \- A number of 20th century modernist poets--including W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot, anti-Semites all--were weirdly drawn to fascism and the far right, but Pound had the distinction of actually being a capital-F Fascist. He was infatuated with Mussolini and lived in Italy during WWII, broadcasting fascist propaganda on the radio. At the end of the war he surrendered to American officials on charges of treason and bounced around psychiatric institutions for a while. Eventually his charges were dropped and he returned to Italy. He died in Venice in 1972 and was buried in the Isola di San Michele cemetery. Nicky hates him a lot. 
> 
> \- Most of the "great men of letters" referenced in this story--Neruda specifically, but also Yeats, Pound, Eliot--were generally terrible people in their personal lives. Though this story focuses on the relationship between the poetic and the political, and generally sidesteps the personal, any conversation about their relative literary/artistic merit comes with an asterisk. It has been brought to my attention that Neruda, in his memoir, recounts an incident in which he rapes a domestic servant in Sri Lanka: an appalling thing that forces us to rethink his legacy and question his cultural preeminence. 
> 
> \- The Romantics and the Symbolists made writer's block trendy. Psychoanalysis had much to say on the subject. Modernism happened. Joe despairs. 
> 
> I hope you know how much I love to hear from you! Reading your thoughts and opinions always brings me great joy.


End file.
